Authors: Felipe Salles and Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill
U.S. President Donald Trump’s interference in Brazil’s domestic politics, by pressuring its judiciary with travel restrictions and 50% tariffs allegedly to protect ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, charged with attempting a post-election coup in 2022, is sundering relations between Washington and Brasilia. Aggravating the situation is Bolsonaro’s son, an elected federal deputy, Eduardo, self-exiled in the U.S., accused of directly lobbying the Trump administration. Trump’s intrusion has boosted current President Luiz Lula da Silva’s previously sagging popularity and has shifted the sentiments of the typically uncommitted bulk of the centralist electorate against Bolsonaro.
For most of the time since the beginning of the 20th century, Brazil has been a close ally of the U.S., participating in both the First and Second World Wars. With a population of 220 million and a $2.1 trillion nominal GDP, it is one of the leading proponents of BRICs and de-dollarization. 26% of its total exports, or $95bn, go to China (of which $31bn are in foodstuffs, $21bn in ores, and $20bn in energy) in commodities in direct competition with U.S. producers, especially in soybeans. Brazil’s president since 2023 and from 2003 to 2010, Lula has blamed the EU, NATO, and Ukraine for the Russian invasion and has long maintained sympathetic relations with Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, China, and Russia.
Brasilia’s politics and consequent foreign affairs policies have oscillated to extremes between the left and the right since the end of the nineteenth century. In both twentieth-century world conflicts, the U.S. expended considerable diplomatic and financial efforts to enlist Brazil’s cooperation, an approach Washington should be preparing for in the case of a probable upcoming conflict with China over Taiwan. U.S. policymakers forget that during both the First and Second World Wars the principal combatants were preoccupied with sometimes years-long negotiation efforts to enlist major neutral countries to their coalition, like Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, and in Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Peru.
Brazil’s natural inclination, like all major countries distant from the theater of conflict, is to leverage its status as a neutral power and ideally sell high-priced goods to both adversaries. On the eve of the First World War, Brazil had a not unsubstantial population of over 20 million. Intending to continue exports of coffee and latex rubber, it declared official neutrality on August 14, 1914, but failed to anticipate the drop in demand for these non-essential items. President Wenceslaus Braz declared war against Germany ostensibly because of five merchant vessels being sunk by submarines between 1916 and 1917, but also because the sinkings led to riots and looting against ethnic German businesses. Brazil seized German vessels in its ports, and Brazil’s neutralist ethnic German foreign minister, Lauro Muller, was asked to resign.
Although the war doubled manufacturing labor and quadrupled factories, it led to rising inflation in food prices that triggered widespread labor union activism. The October 26, 1917, declaration of war against Germany was also driven by the need for the violent exercise of emergency powers against emerging revolutionary activism. The Franco-U.S. promise of loan compensations through reparations by a defeated Germany led Brazil’s subsequent President Rodrigues Alves to prepare a plan for a major army intervention in Europe. The proposal was never implemented due to ambivalent popular support. Brazil’s navy was intended to patrol the African coast to Europe but was crippled by an outbreak of the Spanish Flu while en route. Brazil was allowed to take possession of seventy ships seized during the war and was compensated by Germany for its export and maritime losses.
By the Second World War, Brazil’s population had doubled to 41 million; it had become Germany’s largest single export market and had one million (plus 200,000 immigrant) Germans, six million (of which 1.3 million were immigrants) Italians, and a quarter of a million Japanese diaspora immigrants. President Getulio Vargas’ regime was ideologically sympathetic to Italian, German, and Iberian fascists because of their support of his 1937 coup, through which he sought to confront the rise of communism in Brazil, especially after a 1935 leftist military revolt. The largest number of non-European Nazi party members were in Brazil, in part because most Germans viewed the movement as an extension of German nationalism. Worried about manipulation of German minorities and espionage, typical of Berlin’s operations against Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, Vargas implemented restrictions on political activity even before the war began.
Vargas had sought to pursue a neutralist trade with both sides given that public opinion in Brazil was divided on the war in Europe. However, the June 1941 German invasion of the USSR led to attacks on German businesses. The left, sympathetic to Moscow and influential in labor and the press, thus came to support armed intervention. It also looked like Washington would assume an earlier Berlin proposal to finance the construction of a giant steel foundry. The negotiations culminated in the May 1942 Washington Accords and the construction of the extensive Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional in exchange for the use of Brazilian mid-Atlantic airbases.
Brazil severed relations with the Axis countries following the January 1942 Pan-American Conference, which led to 36 of its merchant ships being sunk by German and Italian submarines, in turn triggering Vargas’ declaration of war on August 21 of 1942 when six other ships were sunk in just two days. Because then all long-range travel in Brazil was made by coastal ship, given the lack of roads, there spread popular panic and growing calls for action and retaliation against Axis immigrants. Brazil’s U.S.-supplied navy and air force provided convoy escort in the mid-Atlantic, destroying eleven Axis submarines by war’s end. Brazil also deployed an army and air force expeditionary force of 26,000 soldiers to the Italian front from September 1944, playing a major role in the push for the strategic city of Bologna, suffering 948 deaths in the process. The war also fueled demand for Brazilian minerals and rubber and led to the development of Brazil’s oil industry.
During the Cold War, Brazil was aligned with U.S. goals except briefly with the left-leaning governments of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart from 1961 to 1964. In fact, in 1965, Brazil turned down a U.S. offer of financial and military equipment to join it in Vietnam due to negative public opinion. The general expectation was that since the U.S. was akin to the older brother, roughly aligned together, Washington would necessarily be there to provide armaments in the event of a Third World War. In the post-Cold War world, Brazil’s U.S. tilt has been steadily eroded by U.S. disinterest in the region and by Lula and Dilma Rousseff’s Worker’s Party policies, although all indications are that they will seek a neutralist foreign policy.
An eventual U.S.-China war with Taiwan, if historical trends apply, is almost certainly to be accompanied by a general maritime blockade imposed by the U.S. Navy, barring a convoy escorted by a strong navy of a nuclear power, such as Russia. However, Washington would be far better served if those Latin American states doing significant business with China, like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, would voluntarily seek to side with the U.S., perhaps as a quid pro quo for industrial investment, technology transfers, or weapons provisions. Brasilia may already have anticipated this blockade, as it did the Royal Navy’s during the Second World War. Unlike the First World War, there is little prospect of Brazilian war costs being covered by Chinese war reparations, as Beijing’s defeat is likely to result in regime change. Washington may not be able to support Brazil’s BRIC-backed aspirations of a permanent UN Security Council seat, given that its nominal GDP is less than Canada’s, and it is a developing country with no dormant historical great power legacy. Brasilia may be especially reluctant to get noticeably involved if there is any nuclear saber rattling.
Most Brazilians are demonstrably neutral on the Taiwan-China dispute. A 2023 PEW opinion poll revealed that more Brazilians view Taiwan unfavorably (34%) than favorably (29%), although when compared in mutual exclusion, Taiwan (11%) was seen slightly more favorably than China (10%). China has a significant media presence in Brazil, although a significant portion of Brazil’s 300,000 Chinese are Taiwanese, which dampens the influence of Beijing’s propaganda.
Brazil is not in a position to offer much military support. According to the 2025 IISS Military Balance, in a come-as-you-are conflict over Taiwan, Brazil would be able to contribute one helicopter carrier, eight frigates for convoy escort duties, two amphibious ships each capable of inserting a battalion of its marines, five P-3 Orion anti-submarine patrol aircraft, and five EMB-145SA airborne early warning aircraft. Its army and air force are obsolescent. Its assigned mission would likely be to patrol the mid and southern Atlantic, particularly ensuring freedom of navigation against suspected Chinese raiders, intelligence trawlers, submarines, and aircraft operating out of sympathetic African ports.
For Washington’s negotiating purposes, it must at least offer as much to Brasilia as Beijing is currently doing, which is already more deeply established in Brazil’s extractive industries and market than is the U.S. Importantly, Brazil is likely to want a navy strong enough to deter being easily blockaded at a strait by a third party. Assuaging this insecurity would likely mean the construction or transfer of ten modern frigates, a cruiser or Arleigh Burke destroyer equivalent, an assault carrier, and P-8 aircraft. This is a small flotilla, but it would triple Brazil’s naval power and give considerable prestige and naval autonomy to the administration in Brasilia. Such a transfer in wartime would not be so easily fulfilled. Nor should the U.S. proceed with such an offer if Brasilia is playing off both sides, due to the risk of sensitive technology transfer to Beijing. The U.S. cannot easily redirect investment or transfer privately owned technology, nor guarantee Brazil’s fruitful absorption of the new science, but it can give Brazil preferred market access, collude on market division given their similarity in exports, and provide low-interest infrastructural loans free of environmental restrictions.
Once the U.S. entered the Second World War, Washington delivered a Manichean ultimatum to Brazil to choose sides. However, the Brazil of 1941 was much smaller and less economically relevant than the Brazil of 2025. First, in the case of a conflict over Taiwan, the U.S. would need Brazil more than the reverse. Second, whereas during most of the early period of globalized trade, Brazil’s commerce with China transited physically and by electronic currency through the U.S., this is no longer the case since 2023. Third, U.S. diplomatic influence is very limited in Brazil, as demonstrated by a few issues.
Communist Cuba has been an important symbol for the left in Brazil and around Latin America because of Havana’s resistance to U.S. pressure. Especially for President Lula’s political party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker’s Party), there would never be a compromise on that issue, even at the cost of sanctions. This same implication applies also to Venezuela. Lula is also profoundly critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, a policy the exercise of U.S. influence has not succeeded in changing. The U.S. Congress is currently considering retaliating against Brasilia for its hosting of an Iranian flotilla in February of 2023. There is little prospect today of a covert U.S. influence operation within Brazil’s robust democracy, which is closely supervised by a free press and social media.
Nevertheless, Brasilia might be receptive to a quid pro quo. Though Lula is an ideological leftist, the history of his economic policies indicates that he is a pragmatist. Brazil’s agro-sector exports provide the plurality of tax receipts and hard currency and are consequently politically prominent, with influence over two-thirds of elected legislators. Even Bolsonaro, for example, visited Moscow because of the importance of Russian-imported mineral fertilizer. However, Lula’s focus has been industrialization. When Brazil opened its economy up to globalized trade in the 1990s, its manufacturing industry was unprepared for international competition and quickly lost ground to imports. More recently, imports once again surged, such as Chinese EVs, which have now established a branding foothold. Only the car and aviation industries, whose units are costly to import, survived.
Therefore, the cost of obtaining Brazil’s agreement in a China-Taiwan war will be far greater than during the Second World War and will likely require Washington’s compromise over Brasilia’s vision of the future of a continental American community of states.
